On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 01:48:34PM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote: > On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 01:41:52PM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote: > > The locking in my lock break patch is ugly and wrong, yes. But it is > > always an intermediate step. I want to argue that with RCU inode work > > *anyway*, there is not much point to reducing the strength of the > > i_lock property because locking can be cleaned up nicely and still > > keep i_lock ~= inode_lock (for a single inode). > > The other thing is that with RCU, the idea of locking an object in > the data structure with a per object lock actually *is* much more > natural. It's hard to do it properly with just a big data structure > lock. > > If I want to take a reference to an inode from a data structre, how > to do it with RCU? > > rcu_read_lock() > list_for_each(inode) { > spin_lock(&big_lock); /* oops, might as well not even use RCU then */ > if (!unhashed) { > iget(); > } > } Huh? Why the hell does it have to be a big lock? You grab ->i_lock, then look at the damn thing. You also grab it on eviction from the list - *inside* the lock used for serializing the write access to your RCU list. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html